Ingredients are the core algorithm driving recommendations, with exclusions and boosters helping to refine the results. Ingredients add content or products to be considered by a recipe and weights them according to visitor behavior and item specific factors.

This Article Explains

This article details the ingredients available in Evergage recipes. Refer to related articles for more information on creating a recipe, and adding exclusions and boosters.

Sections in this Article

REQUIREMENTS

You must have Evergage Recommend integrated with the dataset in which you are configuring the recommendations. Please contact your Customer Success representative to complete your Recommend integration.

Add Ingredients

On the Ingredients tab, click Add an ingredient to select the ingredient from the drop down; scroll to see all options

Adjust configurations for each ingredient as needed

Add additional ingredients as needed

[OPTIONAL]: Enable trending product fallback may be selected for the campaign to show trending products (only) if there aren't enough results returned by the algorithm. Be aware that an item excluded in the recipe exclusions could be recommended if that item is trending. Contact your Customer Success representative for more information

ALTERNATIVE

You can include an Any Eligible Item ingredient which will give you additional flexibility for exclusions and boosters

Click to delete an ingredient

Click SAVE to save your recipe

Your recipe must have a unique name and at least one ingredient before you can save it

Ingredient Descriptions and Configurations

Ingredient

Description

Configurations

Co-Buy

Co-Buy is one of three co-occurrence ingredients. This ingredient looks at items/content purchased or downloaded by previous buyers along with the the anchor item. The ingredient will only consider items/content purchased or downloaded a minimum of 9 times with the anchor item/content for the specified lookback period.

For example, suppose a red plaid shirt (the anchor item) is often purchased with red socks. Since this is a frequent combination, these items have been purchased together hundreds of times during the designated lookback period. In this case, red socks would be recommended when shoppers view or add the red plaid shirt (the anchor item) to the cart.

Conversely, the red plaid shirt (the anchor item) may be purchased with a specific pair of stonewashed jeans, but this has happened less than nine times for the specified lookback period. In this case, these stonewashed jeans would not be recommended to shoppers who are viewing the red plaid shirt or have added it to the cart. Once this combination has been purchased nine times or more, the jeans would then be recommended to shoppers viewing the red plaid shirt or adding it to the cart.

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Lookback (days) - the time period in days that the recipe will look back in the history of views and/or purchases. Enter a value of 0 to look at today only

Anchor - the item or content which is used to determine what recommendations will be served. Anchor items (including content) can be one of: current item on the page, items recently purchased/downloaded within x days, items in cart, items purchased/downloaded in visitor's last purchase/download, items recently viewed, or items the visitor recently spent time viewing

Co-Browse

Co-Browse is one of three co-occurrence ingredients. This ingredient looks at items/content viewed by previous visitors along with the anchor item/content. The ingredient will only consider items/content viewed a minimum of 10 times with the anchor item/content for the specified lookback period.

For example, suppose Article A (the anchor item) is often viewed with Article B. Since this is a frequent combination, these items have been viewed together hundreds of times during the designated lookback period. In this case, Article B would be recommended when visitors view Article A (the anchor item).

Conversely, the Article A (the anchor item) may be viewed with Article C, but this has happened less than nine times for the specified lookback period. In this case, Article C would not be recommended to visitors who are viewing Article A. Once this combination of articles has been viewed nine times or more, Article C would then be recommended to visitors viewing Article A.

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Lookback (days) - the time period in days that the recipe will look back in the history of views and/or purchases. Enter a value of 0 to look at today only

Anchor - the item or content which is used to determine what recommendations will be served. Anchor items (including content) can be one of: current item on the page, items recently purchased/downloaded within x days, items in cart, items purchased/downloaded in visitor's last purchase/download, items recently viewed, or items the visitor recently spent time viewing

Minimum View Time - sets the minimum view time to be considered interested in an item.

SmartBundle

SmartBundle is one of three co-occurrence ingredients. This ingredient looks at products which are bought together in the same cart and returns recommendations based on explicitly defined categories. The ingredient will only consider items/content viewed a minimum of 7 times with the anchor item/content for the specified lookback period. For more information, see Understand SmartBundle.

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Lookback (days) - the time period in days that the recipe will look back in the history of views and/or purchases. Enter a value of 0 to look at today only

Anchor - the item or content on the page or in the visitor's cart which is used to determine what recommendations will be served

Collaborative Filtering

This ingredient returns results based on a user's affinities such as browsing and purchasing behaviors.

Collaborative filtering recommends content and products based on a given visitor's cluster, which is defined by their behavior and interests. In very simple terms, a visitor sees products or content based on a "people like me" algorithm

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Lookback (days) - the time period in days that the recipe will look back in the history of views and/or purchases. Enter a value of 0 to look at today only

Skip serving recs for users with no activity - If the user has not interacted with items in the lookback period, they will not get recommendations from this ingredient but can still get recs from other ingredients in the recipe. This is on by default for all new collaborative filtering ingredients.

Similar Items

This ingredient uses content or items similar in name or description, is included in the same category, or has been tagged the same as the anchor item being viewed or in the visitor's cart

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Anchor - the item or content on the page or in the visitor's cart which is used to determine what recommendations will be served

Trending

This ingredient will show trending products or content across your site. You can define this as items/content based on the number of purchases/downloads, the amount of revenue generated, the number of views, or the amount of time spent viewing. Regardless of the option selected, the lookback period is 24 hours. This can be added as a backup in the event that the recommendations serve too few or no items

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Order By - select how Trending products will be ordered in the recommended list

This ingredient uses the published or created date captured in the catalog to prioritize the most recently published items or content on your site. When combined together, the configuration settings for this ingredient assign a score to each item. That score is used by the algorithm to determine which items or content to show to the visitor.

The Weight, from 1 to 5, determines how the ingredient will be weighted against other ingredients included in the same recipe. The higher the weight, the more the ingredient algorithm will be factored into the recipe results. If the recipe only has a "most recently published" ingredient, the newest products will be displayed. If added, exclusions/inclusions, boosters, and/or variations will also influence the recipe algorithm.

The Decay Age can be set to any number of hours, but should be related to how frequently you introduce new products. For example (Figure A), if you want to promote new products introduced in the last 10 days, you would set the Decay Age to 240 hours. This assigns a score to each item which will decline incrementally as the item reaches 240 hours old.

Relevancy Retained tells Evergage what to do when a product attains the Decay Age. For example, once a product is 10 days old, how important should the item be in comparison to other items that have not reached the Decay Age? For this example (Figure A), let's suppose you want items that have reached the Decay Age to have 80% of the importance of items that have not reached the Decay Age. You would set Relevancy Retained to be 80% (at 240 hours). Items that have reached the Decay Age of 240 hours, will then have a score 80% less than items that were just created or published.

The scores for Decay Age and Relevancy Retained will also be multiplied by the Weight (from 1 to 5). This comes into play if there is more than one ingredient in the recipe.

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Decay Age - the length of time a product or piece of content should stay marked as new

Relevancy Retained - based on the decay age, the length of time a product or piece of content will be included in recommendations by this ingredient

This ingredient uses the expiration date captured in the catalog to prioritize items with a forthcoming expiration date. For this ingredient, the configuration settings — weight, decay age and relevance retained — create a "score." That score is used by the algorithm to determine which items or content to show to the visitor. It is important to understand is that every ingredient has a "score" associated with the settings and that score will be multiplied by weight (from 1 to 5).

The Weight, from 1 to 5, determines how the ingredient will be weighted against other ingredients included in the same recipe. The higher the weight, the more the ingredient algorithm will be factored into the recipe results. If the recipe only has a "soon to expire" ingredient, the products closest to expiration date will be displayed first, all else being equal. If added, exclusions/inclusions, boosters, and/or variations will also influence the recipe algorithm.

The Decay Age (Point B in Figure B) is how long before expiration the score for the item will start increasing from the point of Relevancy Retained. For example, if relevancy retained is at 80%, and the decay age is 240 hours (10 days), then starting 10 days before the item expires, the score will gradually increase from 80% of maximum until it's at a maximum just before it expires and is no longer recommendable.

Relevancy Retained(Point C in Figure B) is the percentage of the maximum score to be retained after the Decay Age has passed. Relevancy Retained only applies to the score before it reaches the Decay Age. This means that as time passes, expiring items become more highly weighted and more relevant to the recipe results.

The scores for Decay Age and Relevancy Retained will also be multiplied by the Weight (from 1 to 5). This comes into play if there is more than one ingredient in the recipe.

Weight - how this ingredient will be weighted against others in the same recipe

Decay Age - the length of time a product or piece of content should stay marked as new

Relevancy Retained - based on the decay age, the length of time a product or piece of content will be included in recommendations by this ingredient

Figure B

Any Eligible Item

This ingredient will serve any eligible item with no special conditions. Any built in requirements will still apply (e.g. products need an explicit price declared), but beyond that any item can be shown. It does not require an anchor item and will still obey other recipe exclusions. Weight is not adjustable for this ingredient as it will automatically act as a fallback ingredient to others in the recipe.

No configuration necessary

Case Study

The Most Recently Published and Soon To Expire ingredients can work together in recommendations campaigns. But as a best practice, you should include Soon to Expire and Most Recently Published in different recipes since each recipe should have a specific goal and these two ingredients have opposing behaviors.

Consider Item A. It will be published one week from today and expire three months later. It will not yet be recommendable by recipes that include the Most Recently Published or Soon to Expire ingredients. Why? Because the item has not been published yet so neither ingredient can recommend it.

In one week, Item A will be published and will begin to appear in recommendation results for recipes that include the Most Recently Published ingredient. As time progresses, more products are published so Item A becomes less prevalent in the recommendation results for recipes that include the Most Recently Published ingredient.

As the three-month mark approaches, Item A will begin appearing in recommendation results for recipes including the Soon to Expire ingredient. Once the three-month mark arrives, Item A will expire and will no longer be recommended in any recipe.